For me, Google video search, Google books (Internet Archive is good, but doesn’t always have the same stuff), Adobe InDesign (but in the process of learning LaTeX), and Typewise. As for the Google stuff, I liked Whoogle a lot, but almost all their instances seem to have been blocked or shut down. Also, apologies if this is repeating an earlier post.
I don’t understand why we spend so much time praising proprietary software in these communities.
As to your question, I have a separate Windows machine for gaming, but that’s it. I keep one foot in the free world and one in the proprietary. As for productivity tools I can’t think of a proprietary tool I “can’t quit” or that I would pick in favor of a free tool.
Fans of proprietary software have this weird belief that free software users choose inferior tools for purist or idealist reasons. This is offensively ignorant. No one chooses bad tools on purpose; we just consider freedom to be part of the criteria of a good tool.
This. Freedom is part of the quality of a program.
Most of the times -for me anyway- not only are the tools free (as in freedom) and free (as in beer) but also simply vastly superior to paid alternatives. I never get why people pay and then put up with shit, or use some SaaS platform where they are the product and get spied on and still put up with so much shit that they would be double better off by switching to something open
That sounds like an idealist reason to me lol
A tool with fewer features that is harder to use is by definition an inferior tool.
You just described choosing an inferior tool for ideological reasons.